Isvik (24 page)

Thus my first glimpse of
Isvik
was from the bathroom window of a seafaring man, who had exchanged his small coaster for a house on the quay looking straight out on to the Magellan Strait. She was, as Ward had said, rusty as hell, but behind the rust she had a solid look to her. I just hoped he'd had a good surveyor on the job before committing himself.

By the time I reached the quay the water out in the centre of the Strait was darkening with little puffs of wind and the mountains west of the town were half obscured by cloud. My breath smoked and I began to feel the wind-chill even through my sailing jersey and the special anorak I had bought for southern latitudes. The quay was white and slippery with the granules of a recent hailstorm.

I was only a short time standing there, but long enough to take in the vessel's lines, the quite dainty sheer, her size and the layout of the masts and rigging. By comparison with a freighter, moored so close her black stern virtually hung over
Isvik
's knife-edged bows, she looked very small, but viewing her from the standpoint of the maxi in which I had raced round the world, I guessed she was roughly the same size – at least twenty-five metres long with a good beam and what looked like a deep V-shaped hull. There was a low deckhouse amidships with an upper wheel and emergency tiller steering from a small cockpit aft. I thought at first she was ketch-rigged, but then decided she was more of a schooner. Her running rigging was in an appalling state, the ropes all frayed and tangled, but the standing rigging, which was partly of stainless steel, seemed to have been well looked after. The hull was presumably steel; it was this that gave her a rust-streaked look under the dirty coating of ice and snow. The topsides and deckhouse, many of the fittings, were of aluminium or some smooth grey alloy.

A blackened pipe stood up out of the deck, just aft of the deckhouse on the port side, a heat haze dancing from the top of it and the ice on the metal supporting bracket dripping moisture. A delicious smell of bacon frying was wafted on a blattering down-blast of wind. I was suddenly very hungry. I went on board and from the open doorway of the deckhouse came the murmur of voices. ‘Mr Ward?' I called his name twice, ‘Are you on board?'

‘Aye.'

But it wasn't Ward who poked his head up the companionway. It was a big, bearded man with a shock of blond hair on a round bullet head that seemed to have no neck. The shoulders were immensely broad, padded out by the grey and brown loose-woven rollneck sweater he was wearing. ‘You are Pete Kettil,
ja
?' And when I said I was he held out a massive paw that gripped my hand as though in a vice. ‘Nils Solberg. Velcome on board
Isvik
. The boss, he is already here. You come for
frokost, ja?
Bakkon, eggs, some seaveed, also fried lichen, what we call
lav
. Is
god. Kom
down.'

Ward was already eating. ‘Nils is a bloody good cook,' he said with his mouth full. ‘But Ah learned one thing already. Ye take a gander at the engines. She may look a ruin topside, but beJaisus, the engine-room … Reck'n ye could've fried the eggs on the cylinder heads it's so bright and clean and polished. That right, Nils?'

‘
Ja
. Engines okay.'

‘So we need a cook. First priority. Nils may be a good cook, but his time will be better spent away from the galley. And we need to dae somethin' about the drive shaft.'

Apparently the retired sea captain, in whose house we were billeted, was willing to provide us with beds ashore, but nothing else. The deal was we made our own beds and fed on board.

‘What about Mrs Sunderby?' I asked.

He looked at me with a quizzical lift to his eyebrows.

‘I suppose she's sleeping it off.' I said it without thinking.

‘Then ye suppose wrong.' He was grinning. ‘She was down before me, breakfasted and lookin' as though she was just off to complete a big business deal in the money centre of BA or wherever. In fact, she's over at the Yard now chattin' up some foreman or other she's got eatin' out of her hand. As ye doubtless noticed, there's work to dae.' He thrust his head forward as the big Norwegian dumped a plateful of an extraordinary mixture in front of me – a great wadge of fried bread, two eggs, two very thick rashers and the rest a mêlée of doubtful greenery swimming in bacon fat. ‘Ah'm Iain, this is Nils, Mrs Sunderby is Iris – no, better call her Eeris, she responds to that much quicker – ye're Peter, or Pete for short, and what the hell we call Gómez we'll find out in due course. But Christian names from now on. Quicker to say, quicker to react to. And by God, where we're goin' we're likely to need quick reactions. Had a look at the riggin'?'

I nodded, suddenly realising what was coming.

‘That'll be yer department. Ah know nothin' about sails, nor does Nils – he's a wizard of an engineer, that's all. And Iris, she's the managin' director. Okay?'

‘And you?' I asked, my mouth stuffed full of lichen which was really much nicer than I'd expected.

‘Me? Ah'm just old moneybags. But Ah tell ye this, laddie, Ah'm a helluva fast learner, so don't think ye can pull the wool or sit around on yer fat little arse doin' bugger all. Ah want that riggin' fixed and workin' inside of a week.'

‘And the sails?'

‘Iris is checkin' on that now. We've yet to find out if they've any sail-makin' facilities here at all. Ah suspect not, in which case we'll have to measure them up and have them flown out. Or we make our own. In a place like this there are bound to be some good seamstresses and Singers will surely have had their salesmen down here back in the days of the square-riggers. Iris will soon have some women organised. She's a great organiser, that girl.'

It was, in fact, Iris who found us a cook. He was a youngster of twenty-two just on the point of being invalided out of the Chilean Navy. Besides cooking, he seemed to have done most things, course after course. His name was Roberto Coloni and he had been in hospital following a bad fall in which he had broken his shoulder blade, forearm and two ribs, as well as suffering bad concussion, which had affected his hearing. It was because of his deafness, not his more obvious injuries, that he was being invalided out, and it was several days before he finally joined us and took up his culinary duties.

My immediate concern on that first morning in Punta Arenas was to learn all I could about the ship. Iain filled me in on the essential details while I was devouring that gargantuan breakfast.
Isvik
had been built in the Canadian Maritimes for an American millionaire who wanted to emulate Staff Sergeant Henry Larsen of the Royal Canadian Mounties who, in the years 1940–42, had sailed the schooner
St Roch
from west to east through the North-West Passage. He was the first to make the Passage except for Amundsen. And then he did it again in 1944, that time from east to west, the first man to make it across the top of Canada in both directions.

The design for
Isvik
was influenced to quite a marked degree by the Peterhead-type sailing vessels of the Mounties, also by a sketch made for him by that extraordinary Antarctic single-hander, David Lewis. ‘Roughed it out fur him on the back of an envelope, a squeeze-up steel hull design with platin' thick as a tanker.'

It was, in fact, a much beamier vessel than the police ship, the hull fining up sharply towards bow and stern so that both fore and aft her deep, strong wedge-shape would cause the ice to squeeze her upwards in the event of her being caught in a series of pressure ridges. She was also much smaller, the police ship having been over three hundred tons. But it was from that and the scribbled design on the back of an envelope that
Isvik
had been pupped. Unfortunately her building was delayed by the failure of the small specialised steel company that was constructing the hull. Then the American millionaire had had a heart attack. He lost interest after that, his plan overshadowed by the oil tanker
Manhattan
making it across the top of America.

Lawyers handling his affairs had then dumped the boat on the market just after Wall Street had had one of its periodic crashes. Three years had passed since the time of her conception and she was still without spars and rigging and had not been fitted out internally. Her purchase by the B. J. Norsk Forsking of Larvik for seismographical work in the Bellingshausen Sea almost due south of the Horn was, as Ward put it, ‘just about the very first good thin' that had ever happened to her,' even if it was a slightly clandestine operation.

He didn't say the vessel was jinxed, but after the sail plan and the interior layout had been redesigned and the ship completed for her new role in Antarctic waters, the B. J. Norsk Forsking, a drilling outfit operating in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, struck a bad patch following a fall in the price of oil and abandoned the Southern Ocean project. They had acquired
Isvik
at a knock-down figure, spent about the same again completing the fitting of her out to their requirements, and Iain Ward had picked her up for not much more than they had originally paid for her. ‘Ah tell ye this, Pete –' He was leaning across the table, his little steely grey eyes bright with a barrow boy's excitement at striking a bargain – ‘it'd cost a wee fortune now just to build the hull. She's plated in the bows with steel eighteen mil thick. If we get caught up in the ice that means she'll pop up like a cork when the pressure's on. At least', he added, with a down-turn to the corners of his mouth, ‘that's the theory of it.'

‘What did your surveyor think?' I asked.

‘Just that. In theory, that's what should happen. There the wee man goes and spoils it all by sayin' he's not an ice man and if we get ourselves into a really bad pressure ridge he couldn't say fur sure what would happen. The truth is, Ah suppose, if ye've got a berg sailin' down on ye and ye're trapped in the ice there's no thickness of steel that will save ye from gettin' crushed. That right, Nils?'

The big Norwegian shook his head, frowning. ‘
Jeg forstår ikke
.' I don't think he found Ward's accent at all easy, and anyway, like many foreigners, he found it easier to speak English than to understand it. ‘Yu haf finish your café, Iain? Zen ve go look at
skrue
shaft, eh?'

There was an old pressure cooker half full of coffee simmering on the stove, a saucepan of milk beside it. I helped myself, and when I had finished, I went up on deck and began sorting out the rigging. Nils had already opened up the engine compartment, which was directly below the deckhouse, and he and Iain were sitting on the floor with their legs dangling over the big diesel, going through a list of requirements he had produced. As I stepped past them Iain had his glasses on and was peering at a diagram the engineer had roughed out in his notepad. ‘Well, that makes sense, but if it means takin' the engine out and havin' engineers crawlin' all over the place so we can't get on with the job of takin' on stores and equipment –'

‘
Nei, nei, nei
. We cut the shaft there. I do it myself. No need for Yard engineers. No need for anything, only gears and lever to disengage. And new dynamo – small one so we haf power off the
skrue
…'

‘The propellor?'

‘
Ja, ja
, the propellor.'

I left them to it. Engines didn't interest me very much. But rigging and sails did, and once I was on deck, coiling and sorting the ropes and making notes of what I would need, I barely noticed anything else, time slipping by and my mind so concentrated on the job that I barely felt the wind force rising, small frozen particles of snow driving almost horizontally. Periodically I went down into the warmth below, to write up my notes and check them over against the ship's design plans, which Nils had produced for me before going off with Iain to talk to the Navy Yard people.

We were almost into November now and I didn't need to be an expert navigator to work out from the charts, and the Admiralty Pilot lying open on the chart table, that to be into the south of the Weddell Sea in time to take maximum advantage of the summer loosening of the pack we would need to be away not later than end-November. It was a voyage of close on two thousand miles and, allowing for eventualities, it would be a month at least before we were within striking distance of the position where Charles Sunderby had had that brief sighting of the
Andros
. And Nils was planning a major operation on our engine. Also the snowmobile ordered in England had not yet arrived.

That evening we learned the name the Argentinians had given their reconstructed East Indiaman –
Santa Maria del Sud
. And it wasn't Iris who told us, though she had known for some time that it had come through the Strait shortly after the
Belgrano
had been sunk. It was the old sea captain, in whose house Nils had billeted us, who told us. Iain had invited him over for a meal. The man lived on his own, except for a half-Indian woman who came in every morning. It was in the nature of a goodwill invitation, nothing more, none of us realising that he was the one man in Punta Arenas who had some idea of why an old wooden-walled East Indiaman, built like a frigate, should have been reconditioned and brought south by the Argentine Navy during the war.

Iris came aboard with him, wearing a long dress and in full warpaint. The
Contraalmirante
had invited her to dine at the C-in-C's residence. He was a Rear-Admiral, and as Commander-in-Chief of the Third Naval Zone, he was the most important man in Punta Arenas. The
Gobernador Marítimo
would be there, also the officer in charge of the Navy Yard. How she had managed it, God knows, except perhaps that beautiful and exciting women dropping in out of the blue at the bottom of the world were not very plentiful. ‘It's important we get the co-operation we need.' She smiled and waved the formidable list of requirements I had helped her prepare.